News of the Weird: Jan. 10

Chuck Shepherd, Universal Press Syndicate

Updated 1:20 pm, Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Government action

One of the principal recommendations following the Sept. 11 attacks was that emergency and rescue personnel have one secure radio frequency on which all agencies that were merged into the Department of Homeland Security could communicate. In November, the department's inspector general revealed that, despite $430 million allotted to build and operate the frequency in the last nine years, it remains almost useless to DHS' 123,000 employees. The report surveyed 479 workers, but found only one who knew how to find the frequency, and 72 percent did not even know one existed (and half the department's radios couldn't have accessed it even if employees knew where to look).

Most Popular

The Philadelphia Traffic Court has been so infused with ticket-fixing since its founding in 1938 that a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court report on the practice seemed resigned to it, according to a November Philadelphia Inquirer account. One court employee was quoted as defending the favoritism as fair (as long as no money changed hands) on the grounds that anyone could get local politicians to call a judge for him. Thus, said the employee, “It was the (traffic) violator's own fault if he or she didn't know enough” to get help from a political connection.

Police report

Anthony Johnson, 49, was convicted in October in Hartford, Conn., of stealing an improbably large amount of money — as much as $70,000 a weekend, off and on for five years — by crawling on the floor of darkened theaters and lifting credit cards from purses.